Celebrity is dependent on gossip and innuendo. Are you an intellectual slummer reading about celebrity

larger | smaller

There is a pull and a paradox to a fascination with celebrity, for celebrity is both soooo exciting and demeaning at the same time? A passion for celebrity is not something one is meant to talk about.

There are worlds, or rather circles, where, if you do, it is assumed that what you are really claiming for yourself is a type of intellectual slumming.

It. ‘Is it true that you have reading that? I mean these celebs are just painted fools, aren't they?one is asked in disbelief, if you read that reg, or watch such crap!?’ as Jacqueline argues in the Cult of Celebrity since celebrity depends for its existence on hearsay, innuendo and gossip. Admitting to a passion for celebrity, it seems, is like flaunting a shameful secret. So there might be an intimate, even passionate, connection between the cult of celebrity and shame.

My own experience is that I used to have a girl friend who was quite famous, the sort of fame where she would be recognised in a store, mostly by old ladies is has to be said'....ooh I saw you on the tele' the other night, can you sign this' I was parasitic on herpublic acclaim, I would drop her off at the television studios where she was filming and how I wished it was me in there being filmed. And then as it is in the way of the worldif you have enough determination, or pathology, it was my turn to be in the studios being filmed, but that did not satisfy my need for acclaim, applying an iron will or was that desperation I became far more famous than my celebrity girl friend, where I was recognised in the street and in some instance pointed at...'there goes...' What I can say looking back at that time of my life ....it was a real nothing burger. So I understand what thinking people say that celebrities and those trying to attain that status are just not serious people.

So how far is pleasure – the pleasure we take in celebrity, for example – bound up with perversion, nothing like seeing a celeb' shown up in a tabloid to have feet of clay, as we gleefully chew on this is that eh...sadism, or with something we experience as perverse? It depends on how you define perversion. There may be a link between shame and celebrity, but we know that there is a link between perversion and shame. Shame, or shaming, with its ostentatious morality, might be seen as a form of perversion in itself. Celebrity is often a ritual of public humiliation.

All is not as it seems no one would be more passionately or pathologically committed to the cult of celebrity than those who construct an elaborate façade of public good as the veil for their own need for acclaim.As with values and ethics one must ask where does this acclaim/fame/celebrity derive from , Leo Braudy argues that our uncertainties about the morality of public behaviour and the personalities of public people arise in great part from the ‘Judaeo-Christian attack against Roman standards of public glory’ (our adoption of ethics and values and morals equally are derived from Judaeo-Christian dogma.